Saturday 27 February 2010

Review of The Good Doctors by John Dittmer

In the light of current debates over health care, this book provides some sobering and relevant insight. Towards the end of his thorough and balanced history of the Medical Committee for Human Rights (MCHR), John Dittmer provides a chapter entitled ‘Health Care Is a Human Right’. It has an epigraph from Aristotle:

If we believe that men have any personal rights at all as human beings, they have an absolute moral right to such measure of good health as society, and society alone, is able to give them. (228)

This chapter details the setting up in 1967 of a community health center, called the Tufts-Delta Health Center, in Bolivar County, Mississippi. It offered free clinical health services to the mainly black community and eventually ‘prescriptions for food’ to treat the malnutrition that was shockingly widespread. The staff ‘attacked the root causes of poor health and deprivation’ (233), organizing sanitation and providing education, with the involvement of the residents a crucial component. It served as a model for the development of other health centers.

Dittmer then leads into a discussion of the efforts by many in the late 1960s and early 1970s, including Senator Edward Kennedy and the MCHR, to put forward plans for a national health program, noting that the ‘United States was the only industrial country without a national health program covering all of its citizens’ (236). Those efforts were thwarted by the American Medical Association (AMA), and pharmaceutical and insurance corporations, who all condemned the non-profit approach to medicine, too much government intervention in health care, and the view that health care was a right not a privilege. As there was no consensus as to what sort of plan should be implemented, the Vietnam War and Richard Nixon’s trip to China took attention away from the issue, and there was no consumer push for action, nothing was done. President Clinton tried it again in the 1990s, and was defeated. Now the administration of Barack Obama is feeling the same resistance.

Continued at Metapsychology Online Reviews.

Monday 15 February 2010

Spinning

My partner and I went to the Sixth Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art on the weekend, for the second time. There will be at least two more visits, because it's so beautiful and thought-provoking and creative, and because we find it impossible to see everything in one visit. Our brains become full and our lower limbs become sore. We need to go away and think about what we've seen, talk about the images and ideas, read the catalogue, go back again.

Hiraki Sawa. O 2009. Spinning objects, physical and on films, placed carefully around a large space. Three huge screens, showing images of vastness and detail: the moon's surface, the Central Australian desert, the interior of an abandoned house. Birds fly slowly and serenely across the sky, and across the wallpaper. Books with French titles, a Hitchcockian stain on a ceiling: for some reason I found my eyes wandering back to the interior more frequently than staying outdoors. I wondered who had lived there, and whether they missed what they had left behind. Were those books never to be opened again?

Sawa: 'Coming full circle is movement without displacement. In that time, you simply are, and all change is in the looking'. (APT 6 Catalogue)

Tuesday 9 February 2010

Complexities - A History of the 'Unfortunate Experiment' at National Women's Hospital by Linda Bryder

Reviewed by Sue Bond



In 1987 I spent a month in Auckland as a student at the North Shore hospital. A journalist friend drew my attention to an article in Metro magazine of earlier that year that had revealed a scandalous experiment at the National Women’s Hospital, concerning women with cervical cancer. So when I saw Linda Bryder’s A History of the ‘Unfortunate Experiment’ at National Women’s Hospital, I was curious to remind myself of this scandal, and perhaps learn the whole story.




Two women, journalist and feminist activist Sandra Coney and sociologist Phillida Bunkle, wrote the 1987 article called ‘An Unfortunate Experiment at National Women’s’ that alleged Dr Herbert Green, an obstetrician and gynaecologist, had withheld conventional treatment from women with abnormal cells in their cervix (carcinoma in situ or cervical dysplasia) to study the course of the disease. A proportion of these women went on to develop cervical cancer, and some of those died. As a result of this article, the Labour Government of the time set up an Inquiry, lead by Judge Silvia Cartwright, which produced a report in July 1988 that concluded the medical profession had failed patients. Many recommendations of Cartwright were implemented, including national screening and patient advocacy.



Linda Bryder is a medical historian, and was researching the history of the National Women’s Hospital (NWH) when she realised that the cervical ‘experiment’ needed a book of its own. What she has produced is methodical, detailed, thoroughly researched and scholarly, if a little dry at times. It is probably more for academics and medical professionals than the general reader, though the lessons she draws from her research are important for society as a whole. As she states in her introductory chapter, the ‘examination of the Cartwright Inquiry provides a lens through which to explore the relationship between women’s bodies, technology and medicine in the late twentieth century’ (6). I think it also reveals the disjunct between the medical community and the public when it comes to understanding health and disease, and that the media often fails to be the bridge between the two.

Go to M/C Reviews: Culture and the Media to continue reading...